The Phoenix Diaries is now available in paperback or as a digital download at Lulu.com!
When Marty Castle's promising career as an actor meets with sudden failure, he joins an international agency created to fight anti-corporate terrorism. Disillusioned and cynical, he is faced with the opportunity to impersonate the Phoenix—a popular radical leader with Robin Hood pretensions. This seemingly suicidal plan is made more plausible by Marty's uncanny resemblance to the slain leader, and by a journal found by the dead man's body. The journal makes clear that the Phoenix has for some time been psychotic, living in a fantasy world, and is no longer the real leader of his organization. What Marty finds when he undertakes this journey is both more ordinary and far stranger than all his imaginings, and in the dream world of the Phoenix he finds what he had lost in his own.
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From the Author of The Pursuit of Loneliness
The Chrysalis Effect shows that the polarization and chaos we see in the world today are the effect of a global cultural metamorphosis, one that has accelerated so rapidly in recent decades as to provoke fierce resistance.
The changes that have taken place in the last fifty years – the feminist movement, minority movements, the spread of democracy, the global economy, the revolutions in physics and biology, the peace movement, the sexual revolution – are all part of this cultural transformation. Contrary to popular opinion, the polarization this metamorphosis engenders is not a struggle between Left and Right, or between the West and Islam, but one taking place within the Left, within the Right, within the West, within Islam, within every individual and every institution.
Our world is in the middle of an adaptive process, moving convulsively toward a cultural ethos more appropriate to a species living in a shrinking world and in danger of destroying its habitat.
Today we’re caught in the middle of this disturbing transformation —a metamorphosis that creates confusion over values, loss of ethical certainty, and a bewildering lack of consensus about almost everything.
The Chrysalis Effect provides an answer to the question:
Why is the world in such a mess?
Reactions to “THE CHRYSALIS EFFECT”
“Philip Slater’s The Chrysalis Effect overflows with gems of insight and surprise. Rarely have I dog-eared so many pages! Let this engrossing book cast its spell on you and you’ll see the world anew.”
— Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet For a Small Planet and Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity and Courage in a World Gone Mad
“Beautifully written, this wide-ranging book is full of fascinating information and trenchant insights. The Chrysalis Effect is an important contribution to the cultural transformation urgently needed today.”
— Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and The Blade and The Real Wealth of Nations
“The Chrysalis Effect is the most brilliant tour de force of this decade. It is, and will continue to be the most powerful and original analysis of this century's planetary vertigo. Slater's path-breaking illumination of our global ‘state of mind’ can be compared only with the work of a Gibbon, or Toynbee or Plutarch . . . should be the most widely read book for years to come.”
— Warren Bennis, University Professor, University of Southern California, author of Transparency and Judgment.
“Philip Slater... is in fine visionary form, drawing on a huge range of material and experience to make a big statement about the main forces at work in the world. Among its other virtues, his new book is encouraging--not something that can be said about much in circulation these days. It ought to launch a thousand necessary discussions.”
— Todd Gitlin, author of The Intellectuals and the Flag, and The Bulldozer and the Big Tent.
“His analysis... is penetrating and all-encompassing, helping us gain insight into the biggest problems and the most intimate of family relationships. He brilliantly demonstrates... that all things are indeed connected in the network age.”
— Rosabeth Kanter, author of Confidence and America the Principled.
“Philip Slater is one of the most keenly observant, forward-thinking, and courageous social commentators of our time… or any time. He has an almost magical ability to alter the way in which we see and understand, and he does precisely that in his newest, and perhaps most provocative, book, The Chrysalis Effect... a wise, audacious, challenging, and unsettling work... Slater offers a hopeful and sane alternative to the often bleak and unreasonable options that many suggest.”
— Jim Kouzes, Executive Professor of Leadership, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, coauthor of The Leadership Challenge.
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“The purest forms of a cultural system always appear as it decays.
When a system is ailing, its believers try to strip away its contradictions and inconsistencies, leaving a system that is more pure, more rigid, and hence more fragile.”
